An API That Shows Where You've Been

For several years millions have shared the places they've been using the Where I've Been website and Facebook application. The site also has an API (our Where I've Been API profile), which allows for much of the same functionality, such as searching countries, marking it visited and adding content such as a story or photo.

The API has an impressive array of methods. Many are accessed via OAuth, which means that users provide your application permission to access their data. Twitter, as well as several other popular APIs, also use this method, more secure than sharing passwords.

Developers of mapping mashups might take specific note of the search and place methods. Developers can find cities by latitude and longitude coordinates, which would allow for some interesting mobile applications, such as logging road trips. Additionally, countries and cities can be searched by name.

The API also contains a few other things we like to see: sample code and even a place to see the platform status (at the bottom of the page).

While the Where I've Been API looks useful for retrieving locations, it's obviously been built to support the site itself. Therefore, the extensive user methods are best used for social travel sharing, the same thing that has made the Where I've Been product so popular.

About the author:Adam DuVander
-- Adam heads developer relations at Orchestrate, a database-as-a-service company. He's spent many years analyzing APIs and developer tools. Previously he worked at SendGrid, edited ProgrammableWeb and wrote for Wired and Webmonkey. Adam is also the author of mapping API cookbook Map Scripting 101.